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Page 3
And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I
greatly marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read,
think of proposing to you the question--what you might have made
of yourselves _without_ the help of Homer and Phidias: what sort of
beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been
by this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of
Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted
in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and sands of Elbe?
Think of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images,
of your natural religion might probably have taken, if no Roman
missionary had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in
pilgrimage.
I have been of late indebted more than I can express to the friend who
has honoured me by the dedication of his recently published lectures
on 'Older England;' and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected
learning have enabled me for the first time to assign their just
meaning and value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon devotion. But
while every page of Mr. Hodgett's book, and, I may gratefully say
also, every sentence of his teaching, has increased and justified the
respect in which I have always been by my own feeling disposed to
hold the mythologies founded on the love and knowledge of the natural
world, I have also been led by them to conceive, far more forcibly
than hitherto, the power which the story of Christianity possessed,
first heard through the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, in the
substitution, for its vaporescent allegory, of a positive and literal
account of a real Creation, and an instantly present, omnipresent, and
compassionate God.
Observe, there is no question whatever in examining this influence,
how far Christianity itself is true, or the transcendental doctrines
of it intelligible. Those who brought you the story of it believed it
with all their souls to be true,--and the effect of it on the hearts
of your ancestors was that of an unquestionable, infinitely lucid
message straight from God, doing away with all difficulties, grief,
and fears for those who willingly received it, nor by any, except
wilfully and obstinately vile persons, to be, by any possibility,
denied or refused.
And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy with which the
main fact of Christ's life was accepted which gave the force and wrath
to the controversies instantly arising about its nature.
Those controversies vexed and shook, but never undermined, the faith
they strove to purify, and the miraculous presence, errorless precept,
and loving promises of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced
in, by every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The Pelagian's
assertion that immortality could be won by man's will, and the
Arian's that Christ possessed no more than man's nature, never for
an instant--or in any country--hindered the advance of the moral law
and intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the contrary; the British
heresy concerning Free Will, though it brought bishop after bishop
into England to extinguish it, remained an extremely healthy and
active element in the British mind down to the days of John Bunyan
and the guide Great Heart, and the calmly Christian justice and simple
human virtue of Theodoric were the very roots and first burgeons
of the regeneration of Italy.[1] But of the degrees in which it was
possible for any barbarous nation to receive during the first five
centuries, either the spiritual power of Christianity itself, or
the instruction in classic art and science which accompanied it, you
cannot rightly judge, without taking the pains, and they will not, I
think, be irksome, of noticing carefully, and fixing permanently in
your minds, the separating characteristics of the greater races, both
in those who learned and those who taught.
[Footnote 1: Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an
Arian, but might have forborne, with grace, his own definition of
orthodoxy:--and you are to observe generally that at this time the
teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to the Father as
touching his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but quite
falsely. Christ's own words, "My Father is greater than I," end that
controversy at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection
of the Son to the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity.]
Of the Huns and Vandals we need not speak. They are merely forms of
Punishment and Destruction. Put them out of your minds altogether, and
remember only the names of the immortal nations, which abide on their
native rocks, and plough their unconquered plains, at this hour.
Briefly, in the north,--Briton, Norman, Frank, Saxon, Ostrogoth,
Lombard; briefly, in the south,--Tuscan, Roman, Greek, Syrian,
Egyptian, Arabian.
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